“It’s a waste of your life and you’ll regret it.”
“I like you, Hood, but you old guys don’t know shit.”
“Are you going track down Kick?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Don’t try it in my jurisdiction.”
Bradley lowered his sunglasses. Then he reached into the passenger’s seat and brushed aside a leather jacket and lifted the jar containing Joaquin’s head. For a moment he held it up in front of his face. The head shifted slowly and the hair lilted and the surface vibrated with the car engine. Then Bradley put it back on the seat and covered it with the jacket. He looked at Hood and nodded and gunned the engine.
Then the Cyclone trundled around the oak tree, spit some dirt and rocks against the old trunk and lumbered back down the road the way it had come.
Bradley’s gang followed, engines growling, the first two drivers giving Hood their best killah stares as their cars eased past him.
The truck came last and paused, and Hood saw that the driver was a girl, red-haired and beautiful.
She studied Hood for a moment with an expression beyond her years, then the truck accelerated around the oak tree and down the road.
45
Hood sat on the dais in Captain Wyte’s fortress in Long Beach. The room was dark except for scattered indicator lights in red and blue, some blinking and some not. Outside the great cranes of the Port of Long Beach hovered over the containers and the powerful lights made the port look as if it were the most important place in all the night.
He heard the elevator moan. His Glock sat on the table next to one of Wyte’s custom computers, a brushed aluminum masterpiece that shivered with subtle colors even in the near darkness of the room.
Hood heard the elevator come to a stop, then the door slide open. Wyte stepped from the lighted box, a leather briefcase in one hand and a bottle-sized brown paper bag in the other.
He went to the wall and turned on the lights low, then adjusted them lower. He had taken just two steps toward Hood when he realized he was being watched and he tried to not react. Hood placed his hand on his pistol as he spoke.
“I’ve got a weapon in my hand, Captain.”
Wyte stopped and looked up at him.
“This is private property and you are trespassing.”
“You’re a sworn peace officer. Within the Sheriff’s Department you have fewer rights than a convicted rapist.”
“You’ve been talking to IA.”
“I have.”
Wyte nodded to the space around him. “All of this can and will be explained. I look forward to it.”
“Me, too.”
“Suzanne started you down this path, no doubt. Something about a computer in the safe house, right?”
Hood shrugged.
“Charlie, she should never have gone after blood diamonds.”
“You shouldn’t have either. All those lives for forty-five grand? What a fuckin’ waste.”
“You have no idea of the truth.”
“I know a lie when I hear it.”
“Why are you here, Charlie?”
“Just to see the look on your face.”
“Let’s talk.”
“Let’s.”
“Drink?”
“First, say hello to some friends of mine.”
One of the IA pack turned up the lights and the others emerged from their respective corners and shadows. Wyte broke for the elevator, but one of the scruffy undercovers shot him straight in the chest with a Taser. Wyte flew backward with a scream and crashed to the floor. The briefcase went one way and the bottle went the other, exploding when it hit. It looked to Hood as if Wyte had been struck by lightning. The cops disarmed him and cuffed him and dragged him upright and dumped him onto the leather sofa below the dais that Suzanne had described to Hood.
Hood stood and holstered his sidearm, went down the stairs then through a side door.
A short hallway led to another room, a windowless, high-ceilinged warehouse filled with neat rows of industrial shelving nearly twenty feet high. Hood saw the big rolling platform ladders like in a home improvement store. Hundreds of televisions, DVD players, computers and peripherals, telephones, faxes, stereo equipment, cameras, musical instruments, coffeemakers, toys-all new and still in their boxes. Near the big roll-up door in the back he saw the pallets heaped with cases of liquor and wine and beer and soft drinks and candy, wrapped in heavy translucent packing plastic. Pallets of tile and car wheels and cigarettes. Pallets of porno magazines and service china and sprinkler heads and hand tools and ready-to-assemble bicycles and swimming pool chlorine and extra-virgin olive oil. Bins of granite and marble and electrical cable and shiny new copper pipe.
Hood shook his head and walked back out to where the cops were interviewing Wyte. He walked past them looking at no one, took the elevator down and drove home.
Two mornings later he walked into the Navy Criminal Investigative Service headquarters on Camp Pendleton with Lenny’s list in his pocket. It weighed a thousand pounds.
Lenny walked in behind him, buzz-cut and ramrod straight, the familiar inexplicable light in his eyes.
46
Hood sat on a rock on the bank of the Merced River in Yosemite and tied a fly on for his father. It was early and they were alone. The morning was cool and quiet, and Douglas seemed uninterested in the skills he had mastered and taught to his son and then lost, all within his lifetime.
Hood finished the knot and watched his father stare out at this new old river. Beyond it the hills were thick with conifers and the sky was a pale blue and there was a plume of smoke from a distant fire.
“We may as well start with a caddis,” said Hood.
“By all means.”
“Thanks for coming out here with me.”
“I don’t see any reason to stay more than just a few minutes.”
“All right.”
They waded into the cold water. Hood pointed to a riffle upstream of them, possibly the same riffle that Douglas had pointed out to him when they first fished this stretch twenty years ago. Hood understood that the saying about something going past in the blink of an eye can be literal, not just figurative.
Hood stepped back to give his father room to cast, the water powerful against his legs. Douglas held his old handmade rod in the air with his right hand and some slack line in his left. The fly was in the water, skittering in place on the surface at the end of its downstream tether. Beyond this basic posture for casting Douglas appeared flummoxed and looked at his son.
Hood waded up behind him and took his father’s hands and started the old motion that Douglas had shown him, the rod tip held high and the wrist firm and the elbow forming a fulcrum and the left hand feeding line or hauling it tight. It was an easy rhythm, and up this close Hood could smell his father’s aging body and the after-shave he’d used his whole life, and he could feel the loose coolness of his skin and the lightness of his bones and the reluctant machinery of his joints.
Douglas shrugged him off with an obscenity and Hood waded toward the bank so he could watch.
His father looked at him, then took up the cast again, and Hood watched the white fly line loop back and forth overhead in increasing lengths until it shot forward straight and settled and a silky filament unfurled at the last instant, placing the tiny fly at the head of the riffle.
His father mended the line then smiled at Hood with joy and the memory of joy.
Standing where this river briefly intersected time, Hood believed that all on Earth was forgiven.
He smiled back.
T Jefferson Parker
